Theology of Trade

For some
time now, Christians have become increasingly concerned about the level of
injustice inherent in our international trading system. This has particularly
been the case for Christians in the West who have slowly begun to understand
that we are somehow implicated in this injustice. The way in which local church
congregations provided the early seedbed for the fair trade movement is a good
illustration of this growing concern.

However,
anyone who has scratched the surface knows that international trade, and how it
affects different people, is a horrendously complex thing. Unfortunately,
critical discussions about trade often gets pushed into simplistic opposing
positions of ‘pro-trade’ and ‘anti-trade’, which quite rightly makes many feel
uncomfortable. And then there is the nagging doubt for many Christians that all
this justice stuff about complex global issues is somehow taking us away from
our ‘true vocation’ which is about spiritual stuff.

So what, if
anything, does the Bible have to say about all of this? Can the Bible help us
to make critical judgements about the role of trade in human affairs, and how
does it inform our ethical frameworks in doing this?

Trade as a basic human
activity

To try to
arrive at any useful theology of trade, we need to understand the practice of
trade in its particular context. So before we begin to unpack what the Bible
has to say, we need first to acknowledge that trade is older than history
itself and is common to all human societies. When writing first began in
Sumeria around 3000BC we find humans recording trading relations which were
already highly developed. Australian Aborigines, although they had no monetary
economy, still had extensive trading networks criss-crossing the continent. The
hill-tribes of Laos,
who are in most things self-sufficient, have always traded forest produce for
sea salt, for which they have no source and without which they fall victim to
goitre (iodine deficiency).

This tells
us that trade serves a very basic and useful function for human societies – to
make use of our excess in a way that can supplement our deficiencies. However
over human history, trade has developed in complex ways, and by Biblical times
the trading activity of the Near East was
already inextricably bound up in issues of politics, military power, social
structure, and questions of religion and culture. What does the Bible have to
say about all of this?

Trade & Israel

Right from
the early accounts of Abraham in Genesis, trade and trading activity is an
assumed part of the normal background of the ancient world being described, and
is little remarked upon. The code of living set down for Israel in the
Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) has little to say about trade
and trading ethics compared to the older Babylonian Code of Hammurabi
(c.1260BC). The sections of the Torah most relevant to the life of merchants were:
(i) a strong injunction against using false weights and measures (a common
practice in ancient times) to cheat people (Deut 25:13-16); and (ii) the
prohibition on charging interest to fellow countrymen, which probably would
have served to relegate larger and more risky endeavours in trade and commerce
to foreigners.

Indeed, the
overall ideal of ‘the Promised Land’ which seems to be envisaged in the Torah
is a nation of largely self-sufficient small-holders, in which trading activity
does not seem to play a significant part other than to supply commodities that
cannot be produced at home.

By the time
we get to the Biblical account of King Solomon, it is clear that the ideal of a
self-sufficient nation has been abandoned. In chapters 9 & 10 of 1 Kings we
are given are substantial account of Solomon’s international commercial
dealings, and in particular all of the luxuries which he imported. On the
surface level this seems to be an account of ‘Solomon’s splendour’ without
editorial comment. However, reading between lines there may be an implicit
critique of these activities – the passage moves from an account of Solomon’s
foreign imports to a description of his love for foreign women (11:1) and how
these eventually ‘turned his heart after other gods’ (11:4).

The Prophets

If 1 Kings
provides a subtle critique, the prophets offer a number of powerful and
strenuous critiques of the trading activities of Israel and her neighbours. At one
point the prophet Zephaniah proclaims:

‘Wail, you who live in the market district;
all your merchants will be wiped out,
all who trade with silver will be ruined.’ (Zeph 1:11)

The
language is strong, but what exactly is the complaint? If we look across the
prophetic texts, we find a number of concerns being consistently expressed. These
are all inter-related, but we can perhaps list them in four categories:

(i) The relationship between international
trade and religious compromise

In the observation of the prophets, the
motivation behind trade in their time had gone well beyond suppling needs not
met at home, and had become driven by seduction
to the way of life of foreign countries. This seduction may have begun with
material goods, but flowed inevitably to ideas
and religion (see Isaiah 2:6-8).

(ii) The relationship between international
trade and unjust social structures

Much of the prophetic criticism relates to the
luxury goods being imported by the wealthy elite (eg. Isaiah 3:13-26). In this
respect, what is being called into question is not necessarily the goods
themselves but the unjust economic systems by which the rich ‘grind the face of the poor’ to enable their
lives of comfortable excess.

(iii) Trade which is itself exploitative

Although not necessarily explicitly addressing
the activities of international trade, in the observation of the prophets much
of the commercial activity of their time was essentially exploitative,
extracting a surplus from the poor (see Amos 5:11, 8:4-6). The prophet Nahum
makes this accusation directly against the international trading activity of Nineveh:

‘You have increased the number of your
merchants
till they are more than the stars of the
sky,
but like locusts they strip the land
and then fly away.’ (Nahum 3:16)

(iv) Trade as a source of power

Two of the most substantial critiques of
international trading, Isaiah 23 and Ezekiel 27, are both denouncements of the
city of Tyre, the great Phoenician trading power of the ancient world. The
complaint here is against both the power and the seductive influence wielded
through its extensive international trade.

The Book of Revelation

The New
Testament makes very little explicit reference to macroeconomic issues of
international trade (although, as we will see, much of what Jesus has to say
has significant relevance). There is
however one powerful exception: the Book of Revelation perhaps provides the
strongest Biblical statement concerning the trading relations of its time (the
time of the Roman Empire), and it is not a
pretty picture. What should be alarming for us is that it is commenting on an
international trading structure which is not so dissimilar from our own.

In chapter
six of Revelation, the third horseman of the apocalypse rides forth to a cry
which unveils the fundamental trading distortion of the Roman Empire: ‘A quart
of wheat for a day’s wages, and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages, but
do not damage the oil and the wine’ (Rev 6:6). It is a statement that says the
poor can barely afford to supply their basic food needs, while they labour to
supply the extensive luxuries of empire. In chapter thirteen, the particular
significance of the mark of the beast – that is alignment with anti-Jesus
forces - is that it enables participation in the trading economy (13:16-17). In
chapter 18, the three groups of people who lament the fall of Babylon
(Rome) are all
closely implicated in her trade: the kings of the earth ‘who share in her
luxury’; the merchants of the earth; and the sea captains. This chapter
provides us with an extensive list of the luxuries in which Babylon traded, ending with the chilling
insight that this trade included ‘the souls of men’ (18:11-13).

Jesus

While Jesus
did not directly address issues of international trade, he had many forceful
things to say about money, wealth, greed, and commerce, all of which must be
taken into account when discerning a biblical ethic concerning trade. These
teachings are too numerous to explore adequately here, other than to sample
some striking examples:

(ii)
‘How
hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom
of God’ (Luke 18:24) –
again, this poses significant challenges for merchants and traders who tend to
reside at the higher end of the economic pyramid.

(iii)
‘Be
on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the
abundance of his possessions.’ (Luke 12:15) – this is one of many warnings by
Jesus about the getting and acquisition of goods.

Of course,
this does not yet capture Jesus’ most important statement concerning ethics …

Towards a Biblical
Ethic of Trade

I am of the
opinion that biblical ethics is actually a very simple field. Jesus summed up
all the law and the prophets with only two commandments - Love God and love
your neighbour (Matthew 22:37-40). In trying to arrive at a biblical ethic for
trade, this must be our start and end point. Questions of what is traded, how
trade is conducted, and how much we trade, all must be judged against what the
impact is upon other people and our relationship with God. All of the biblical
protests that we have looked at concerning the world of trade have been spurred
by the transgression of these commandments.

Thus, the
Bible has nothing to say directly about particular trade theories or policies –
such as whether free trade or trade protectionism is better – the ethics of
this depends entirely on the context
of what this means for particular people in particular places, what it means
for communities and societies as a whole, and especially what it means for the
poor.

Finally, we
need to note that the Bible locates ethical responsibility with all of us, not just those directly involved in international
trade. The prophetic critique is a critique of systems and not of individuals. So in relation to trade, the
question for us is not whether we personally have done anything to harm someone, but
whether we have cooperated with and benefited from a system which is unjust.

The
prophets call for repentance and reform at a systemic level. Revelation calls
us to extricate ourselves – as much as is possible – from the sins of the
system (‘Babylon’):
‘Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins …’
(Revelation 18:4). In all of this, we are being called to take responsibility
for the systems which we take part in.

Application today: the
theory of Just Price

While the
biblical principles are essentially simple, applying these to the
mind-bogglingly complex world of international trade today is extraordinarily
difficult. We are at a disadvantage because for a few hundred years the Church
effectively abandoned the work of applying biblical ethics to the world of
politics and economics. By contrast, the Medieaval Church
did a lot of detailed work in trying to understand just what the principle of
‘love your neighbour’ might mean in the complex world of trade and commerce.
The core principle which they arrived at is one which we would do well to
revisit today – the theory of just price.

Essentially,
this teaching repudiated the ideas that the price of goods should be solely
determined by ‘the market’, because it recognised that the market was
characterised by huge imbalances in power, leaving the poor vulnerable to
exploitation. While it recognised an important role for the market, the theory
of just price taught that the pricing should reflect a fair counting of the
cost and effort of the labourers, producers, manufactures and merchants
involved in getting a good to market, and a fair estimation of the needs of
consumers. Thus it is not fair to opportunistically drive up prices to
consumers in times of famine, nor is it fair to drive down prices to producers
in times of oversupply. And this wasn’t just left to theory – Medieaval
scholars (theological economists?) actually crunched the numbers to try to
commend fair and realistic pricing for all sort of goods.

Essentially,
this is the idea behind the fair trade movement. However this occupies a tiny
niche of the vast range of the traded goods that we consume. As First World
Christians, we have an enormous collective job to do in applying the idea of
just price to the whole supply chain:

1) How do we apply ‘just price’ to the
wages involved in producing goods?

2) How do we apply ‘just price’ to take
a true account of the natural resources involved in producing a good?

3) How do we apply ‘just price’ to take
account of the carbon emitted in producing and transporting a good?

4) How do we apply ‘just price’
differentially to goods that are necessities (especially for the poor) and
goods that are luxuries?

5) How do we apply ‘just price’ to goods
that are in shortage or oversupply?

Finally, it
is important to note that we have responsibilities in two fields: as consumers
and citizens. As consumers we are everyday implicated in the vast injustices of
our global trade system; as citizens in a democracy (that is, people who
actually get to choose their
government) we have a peculiar responsibility to do all we can to work for a
change in the system.